The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare with author David Hajdu.

Comic books, not rock-and-roll, created the generation gap. (They also spawned juvenile delinquency, crime, sexual deviance, and things of such depravity that were we to name them, our note wouldn't get through your "adult content" filter.)

Long before Elvis appeared on Ed Sullivan from the waist up, long before Jerry Lee Lewis married his cousin, long before James Dean yelled "you're tearing me apart," teachers, politicians, priests and parents were lining up across from comic book publishers, writers, artists, and children at bonfires and Senate hearings decrying the evil that was The Ten-Cent Plague.

In what is the third in an informal trilogy about American popular culture at mid-century, Hajdu (Lush Life, Positively Fourth Street) radically revises common notions of popular culture, the generation gap, and the divide between "high" and "low" art- Cody's Books

David Hajdu

David Hajdu writes a monthly column for The New Republic on music and popular culture. He is a contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair. Mr. Hajdu was the general editor of Entertainment Weekly from 1990 to 1999, editor-at-large for the New York Times Magazine Group from 1985 to 1990, and the editor-in-chief at Video Review from 1980 to 1985.
Mr. Hajdu is the author of Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn, published in 1996 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina, published in 2001 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Both of his books were named finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Additionally, Mr. Hajdu has been published in the anthologies: O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors and Best Music Writing 2000.